Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1425: Just the Facts

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Cardinals, the Nationals, and the NL’s increasingly interesting playoff races, the pluses and minuses of expanded September rosters, a caveat about time-traveling to see Mike Trout’s final game, and Justin Verlander’s third no-hitter and the role of health in determining pitchers’ careers, then discuss the significance of […]

I am gone, three times around, three times around. Good morning and welcome to episode 1425 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast with Fangraphs, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg, the ringer. Hi. Hi. You had some beef with the NL playoff races a few weeks ago.

You were not that interested in them because the teams were all pretty lackluster, and it seemed like, wow, how exciting. Could we be rooting for these mediocre teams, for one mediocre team to be slightly less mediocre and um particularly the central particularly the central okay and it did not occur to me at the moment but it has since occurred to me that the nature of having a you know seven team race is that presumably one of them will rise above every other team that it's not going to be that the other six are all going to collapse instantaneously but that one will get better. And so now these couple weeks later, the Cardinals are leading the central they're on pace to win 91 games, the Nationals

are on pace to win 92 and get a wildcard spot. There is still that that second wildcard that is going to be won by a team that is not currently very, very, very good. But even then, someone's going to get hot and probably end up with 88, 89, 90 wins. Does this soothe your soul? Are you happy with 91 and 92 win teams, or have we become spoiled by this particular moment in time? Yeah, I'm a little spoiled by the Dodgers, Yankees, Astros, juggernauts, but I think as long as you get into the 90s, that's a respectable win total. And I think if you look at some of those teams, they're kind of intimidating. I think my colleague Zach Cram is writing an article for Tuesday, so maybe it's up if you're listening to this, about the Nationals

as the NL's biggest threat to the Dodgers. Obviously, the Nationals have been playing very well for quite a while now since their slow start. And the Cardinals, I think, were my wildcard pick heading into the season. But they have looked like they would win the division before, and then they looked like they would be out of the playoffs entirely. And now they've got a three-game lead in the Central, so they've been playing well too. And I don't want to shortchange the Braves. The Braves are kind of a fun team. The Braves are, I guess, the best of those teams because they're an 85 win team already. But yeah, I think there's enough here that I'm a little more into it now. So there are four teams currently on pace to win 100, not just the big three, but also the Twins.

And then the Braves are on pace to win 99.2 99 there was a wasn't there a year a period from like 2009 to 2014 or something where only like one team won 99 games or something yeah I'm remembering this right there were no hundred win teams for a stretch of few several years I forget exactly how long but yeah now it's like the norm now I mean this is this has never happened before, right? That you might have four and that you'd have three. I don't think that's happened in a single season before. Right. Well, so I looked at this because I was answering some questions for a round table at ESPN. And if you look at winning percentages, if you set a 6-17

winning percentage, which is a 100 win pace in the 162 game schedule, then there are a couple of years in the past, I believe where there were 400 win teams. I think there's only one where you have three teams with winning percentages as good as the big three, the Astros, Yankees and Dodgers. And then there's no team in the 162 game schedule or no season in the 162 game schedule with 400 win teams, nor obviously would there be five. I mean, five. Get out of here.

If there are 500 win teams. Yeah. That's got to be a lot of terrible teams on the other end of it. Well, there's 400 lost teams, which is I think only the second time that that's ever happened. Yeah. Or maybe it's the first. I can't keep track. It doesn't matter.

First or second, basically the same. So anyway, yeah. So 91,92 used to be a normal thing. Like the Giants, when they were winning their World Series, it was always with 91-92. And sometimes they'd win the division. So yeah, anyway, my point is that the Cardinals and the Nationals have been on fire. They both look like really good teams. And I don't feel like watching this pennant race kind of settle itself has felt like seeing loser teams rise to the top, but actually good teams rise to the top. And I feel good about both of those teams. Yeah, I feel pretty good about September in general. I'm kind of glad we got over the August hump.

August is sort of a tough time to write about baseball, I guess. I haven't even been doing it all that much lately because it's tough to find storylines in August. I find that's kind of the time when we know what certain storylines of the season are, but we're not quite up to the final finish where everything gets really exciting, ideally. I'm looking forward to some of these playoff matchups, and there's still some good races left. And I don't know if there's anything else that is fascinating me, but we do have a bunch of prospects that just came up because 40-man rosters are here for the final time, which I was going to bring up because Doug Glanville wrote about this for The Athletic. And I think we talked about it probably when it was announced that this would be the final year for 40-man rosters. And after this, it will be going to 28-man for all future years. And I think that's good in general. I think Doug concludes that it's good probably too, just because we're in this era where teams really like specialists and making strategic decisions and using tons and tons of players. And it can just

get kind of unwieldy. September baseball can get long and slow and sort of players. And it can just get kind of unwieldy. September baseball can get long and slow and sort of silly. And you have the mismatches between certain teams, which of course, any team can call up as many people as it wants, but some teams have more depth than others. And I guess you could say it's a reward for having a bunch of almost good enough players that can come up in September, but it's not how you play most of the season. It's not how you play October. So I don't really mourn the end of expanded rosters. But as Doug pointed out, the nice thing about it is that lots of guys get to make their big league debuts and some of them are very talented and would have anyway. I mean, Gavin Lux came up, of course, and that's partly because of Max Muncy's wrist fracture.

So that probably would have happened anyway. But you get to see a lot of guys who come up a little bit earlier than they would have or they're lifers who've been hanging on forever and they just get their cup of coffee and they can say they made it. And Doug pointed out it's a victory for those players, of course, and for their friends and families, but also for the organization as a whole. players, of course, and for their friends and families, but also for the organization as a whole, because everyone who makes a major league debut had some scout sign him and someone pushed to draft him and coaches develop him along the way. And when that person makes it to the majors, they all feel like they made it to the majors a little bit. So that's the thing that I think we will miss. And that's sort of sad about expanded rosters going away. I'm sure that there is a paper trail of me contradicting what I'm about to say, but I never minded the big, crazy 40-man rosters.

I like the weird September baseball. And the fact that that's not how we play the rest of the season never really bothered me because it is how we play September. It's how we played it for a really long time. I mean, why not? But it was kind of farcical and i guess i guess it does make sense that they would go down to 28 but i liked it i liked having a bunch of guys who were i mean i don't like september for the good prospects i like september

for the uh the bad prospects the ones who uh only who earned their way there for games that don't really matter that much. And that's it. I think, you know, as we've talked about on here, the more ballplayers can make the majors better. Like that is a that is just a net gain for the universe's storage of happiness. As many people as possible should make the majors. So I'm pro 40 man in September. Yeah, the top prospects will make it eventually most likely, and some of them, even if they don't get activated for September, they come up and they ride the bench and they drink in the major league atmosphere and they form those bonds. That's happened for quite some time, and I agree that, then it wouldn't be quite as select a group. But it's very select as it is, and September rosters didn't really do anything to diminish that. So it's nice, and yeah, it's especially nice because there's always one or two stories of someone who only made it for that September and they were hanging on and out of those so i already have my hands full trying to get to know everyone and then

a whole bunch of new ones arrive on the same day so that's a little tough but i'm happy for them yeah i don't mind learning a bunch of new major leaguers because i'm already overwhelmed like to me it's just like you're getting you know you're getting a bucket of water thrown on you in a in a rainstorm it doesn't change the number of ballplayers that I don't know, because the number of ballplayers I don't know is already pretty big. Like every game I learn a ballplayer. And so September doesn't change that much. I just remembered one thing I love about September call-ups, which is a memory, though I'm sure this happens in a bunch of clubhouses every year. But I'm remembering a particular memory, which is

that there was a year when the Angels called up, you know, however many they had 36 or whatever. And, uh, they had 35 like, uh, lockers in the clubhouse. So, you know, everybody's, everybody's packed in tight. Like, I don't think that I don't, I, if I remember this right, you don't, you know, you, the stars don't get there too next to each other in September. Everybody's packed in real tight. But even with that, there was one leftover. And so there would just be this one guy with a locker in the middle of the room that was just sort of set up there like a porta potty.

And I thought the first time I saw it in there, I thought like I couldn't figure out what was going on. Was this a prank? Had he been pranked? Were his teammates doing a prank on him? But no, that's just how he lived for a September. Right in the middle of the clubhouse with a freestanding locker. I like that. Yeah, that's nice.

I also had a last year I wrote about Jacob Stallings as like the perfect September call up career because he basically only came up in September and for three years in a row, he got called up. He got these September call ups. So I wrote about how he's like basically he's so close to being good enough. Like if there were 32 teams instead of 30, he probably would be in the majors all the time. But if there were no September call ups, he would be in the majors like never literally like almost literally never and he

had a bunch of huge hits in his career he was a pretty you know he'd had some a couple of walk-offs and and things like that but then this year he's just a a regular major leaguer so the jacob stallings september uh romanticism that i was pushing is done all right we got an email about traveling in time to see mike trout's last game which uh we got a bunch of them but this is the one that we need to read it's very quick we won't even have to discuss it but it's from scott who writes emailing just for the quick point i wish i thought of but no it was my 11 year old i gave him sam's article to read before re-listening to your podcast discussion of it and and he said this. There's a small chance he has already played his last game because you never know what could happen right now,

which means that you'd be trying to time travel to the past or to a future event that doesn't exist, raising the risk that you would end up in the void by setting your time machine to a future event that doesn't exist or is in the past. But, ah, ugh. good point, Scott's son. Yeah. Well, who would want to go on as I responded if Mike Trott's career is already over?

There are other destinations. If we can use the time machine to say that I want to see a certain event and not have to tell it a certain date, then there are certain things that I think I would want to go see. I was pretty down on time travel before, but that's if I had to specify a date. So if I could say I want to see the first game played on another planet, someone suggested that somewhere, that would be fun. I would go see that. Or the first game with a woman player making her debut, I would go see that. So there are some like that if I don't have to specify, but that is a good point that some of these things we don't

know that it may not have already happened. A lot of people pointed out that if you travel to see Mike Trout's last game and you get there and it's like, you know, May 2021, like, you know, oh shoot, like I'm in for some bad news. Like, this is going to be a depressing day. But I actually think that it would be better to find out if, you know, something were to happen. I would rather see it than read about it on a tweet. Like, to me, the finding out on a tweet would actually be worse.

I don't know why, but I feel like I owe it to him. Well, then there's the whole question of when you come back, then do you not try to change history? Do you not warn him that that's his final game so he can avert whatever disaster occurs? I don't know. If you say that you can't change the future no matter what, I think I'd still rather know in that case

so that I could appreciate him while he's here and performing at his peak and I could watch all his games and I could get all my Mike Trout stories that I've ever wanted to do in while I can still do them. Although it'd be weird to write about him knowing that that's coming and not be able to tell him or help him in some way. So that would be mortally difficult hmm yeah well i think it probably would be pretty simple to come back and just change everything i think that it's pretty easy to play with space time continuum nothing goes wrong yeah all right anything else well we should maybe talk a little bit about justin verlander unless you were planning to later in the episode but no i did not see Justin Verlander's third no-hitter.

I was away for the weekend, didn't have cable, didn't have Wi-Fi, so I was following it from afar. But this was a very impressive no-hitter. You could say they all are, but of course, some of them are more impressive than others. This was a 100 game score no-hitter. It was a 14 strikeout no-hitter. It was, from what I understand, not a no-hitter where he

had a whole lot of defensive help. There weren't a bunch of plays where someone was just robbed to preserve the no-hitter, which happens sometimes or even most of the time. This was just a dominant start and doesn't really affect our evaluation of Justin Verlander or his career, but it puts him in another very exclusive group. And so a lot of people are taking retrospective looks at Justin Verlander's career. And Joshian made an interesting point, I thought, in his newsletter, which was that so much of how we perceive a pitcher's career just comes down to fate, essentially, or luck, or whatever you attribute the ability to stay healthy to which is true to a certain extent for every player but particularly true for pitchers because

there seems to be only so much that you can do to keep a pitcher healthy and teams are doing a lot of it already so we're kind of past the era where guys get irresponsibly overworked and you can point to someone's usage in a certain season or before a certain age and say, oh, he broke because they worked him too hard. Like maybe Felix is like the last guy you can say that about possibly just because teams tend to be so careful with guys these days and you have innings limits and teenagers don't get worked very hard and you don't see the single season innings totals that you used to see and so now that teams are taking those steps to protect pitchers perhaps even going overboard and protecting them at times but erring on the side of caution you can't really say oh this guy got hurt because his team used him irresponsibly or his manager worked him too hard. And so it really comes down to just how strong is your UCL? How strong is your shoulder? I mean, assuming that every major leaguer is putting the work in and doing the

exercise regimens and the conditioning and getting their sleep and nutrition, and I'm sure that varies from guy to guy, of course, but probably doesn't vary as much as just how strong are your ligaments and will they break and will you just be able to throw 95 when you're 36 years old like Justin Verlander. And not a lot of guys can, but that kind of determines who ends up as the greatest pitcher of all time and who ends up in the Hall of Fame. It largely comes down to that because you get your Johan Santanas and your other guys who were certainly Hall of Fame type pitchers, but just broke, didn't last quite long enough, whereas Rowlander did.

And so we get to see him throwing his third career no hitter and being dominant at this age, which is great. But it really comes down to kind of a quirk of genetics, essentially, which is sort of strange to think about. Yeah, I mean, it's strange to think that that's what we get so emotional about and what we root for so passionately about and what we make people heroes for. I mean, we don't consciously think of that. We're obviously always very scared of injuries we're we're wary of them we price them into how we value a player's future or or what we think they're likely to contribute to our team this year uh but we don't cheer them on and and like say like oh yeah he's got such good ligaments like i love it i love it like you don't gif it there's no gif uh there's no

highlight of his elbow holding up when he makes the hall of fame and so yeah it is really weird i mean if you had to like if every pitcher's like keys to the game has had strong ligaments so far has to keep strong like i wonder if it would eventually just get like drive home to you that like what you're watching is a sort of a a very strange experiment on the human body and that while rooting for it you're in a strange way like i don't know you're like a scientist in a lab who's like rooting for like the shampoo to not like uh harm the reese's monkeys or something like that like it's a very weird thing that we're that we're cheering for uh and it's best in a way that we don't that we don't we don't like that's not that fun like we somebody asked us a question the other day i'm gonna change

directions a little bit but this is all on the same topic which is if the world were exactly the way it is except instead of mike trout being the best player in baseball, Pat Venditti was the best player in baseball, like the best player. Would that be better or worse? Everything else is exactly the same, but would it be better or worse? And I started thinking, well, if he were the best player in baseball, then we would all think, well, it's just because he can throw with both arms. And that's not a skill that you can work on through not a skill that you can like work on through grit. Uh, it's not, or well, maybe it is, maybe it is, but we wouldn't think that like Pat Venditti is that because like he, he wanted it more.

We would just think, oh, well he's like, wow, he's quite the lucky thing that he was born that way. And I thought, well, maybe that wouldn't be fun. Maybe it's better to, to dilute ourselves into thinking that Mike Trout is not the exact same thing, just with a different set of less obvious skills. Like Mike Trout is also born with physical skills that nobody else has. It is the combination of work and mental ability and also like a whole lot of lucky, lucky draws when you were born. And as you go through life and things that don't harm you and environmental factors that don't end up affecting you. And so is it better to live with the delusion and not really acknowledge it? And then I started thinking, well, wasn't Randy Johnson, the best player in baseball for a long time? And he was, I mean, he was every bit as, as kind of out, you know, biologically unique among ballplayers as Pat Venditti is. And so we didn't seem to mind. It

didn't feel like it cheapened it any. And so then I thought it would probably be fine. I don't think it would matter whether it's Venditti or Trout or Randy Johnson. But the point that I am trying to make is that we'd like to believe that there's more agency in these players' careers than there probably is, because it's not that much fun to think about it as not being that way. But on the other hand, of course, there is a lot of agency. There is less than we probably think, and also far, far, far more than random chance. And so like with Verlander, it would not matter how healthy he was. I mean, it would matter, but it would not matter how healthy he was if he had not also figured out a way through adaptation and incredible hard work. I mean, he is the sort of prototypical older player who's like

a fitness fiend, right? Isn't he? Like he's known for being like, particularly after his core surgery, of being like really, really, really, you know, a hard worker. He's a, he is kept himself fit in a way that certain other pitchers have not, uh, as they've gotten older. And so does it, I don't know. I mean, should it, should I be worried that it would cheapen things if I was constantly thinking about how lucky it is that his ligaments hold up? Probably not. Uh, but it's probably best that we just sort of acknowledge it every so often as we do right here, right now, and not like obsess about it. Yeah. And it's nice that in baseball, we're talking about UCLs mostly, which can be a career threatening injury, but not a life threatening injury. Like if you're watching football and

you're a football fan, then it's not just, is this player going to get hurt in a way that jeopardizes his career? It's, is he going to get hurt in a way that jeopardizes his career it's is he going to get hurt in a way that jeopardizes the rest of his life and you don't typically have to worry about that with pitchers unless they get hit by a comebacker or something then maybe you do but i think it still is kind of just like a lottery it's like a certain number of guys are going to get hurt and they have hall of fame talent but they don't have a Hall of Fame UCL, and Justin Verlander does. And we talked not long ago about whether we should have known that his lull a few years ago where it looked like he was declining and was hurt and was done, whether we

should have known that he was going to bounce back from that. And I think we concluded that we shouldn't have, that it was okay that we doubted him at that time. And I since saw that he doubted himself at that time, and he thought he was done at that low point. So if even he didn't know, then I don't feel so bad for not knowing. Because again, it's just, that's the typical trajectory. You do start wearing down and you do lose velocity. And with Justin Verlander, he just hasn't. And I don't know whether that is replicable. I don't know whether there's a certain stretch he does, a certain exercise he does. He does this many sets and this many reps. And if you just do that, then you'll be healthy forever. Probably not because you can't really even strengthen your UCL

noticeably. As far as I know, it's just kind of the weak point. And with some people, it's weaker than others. And obviously with him, it is not weak. And so he just sort of lucked out in that respect, no matter how hard he works on everything else. But he's obviously made the most of that gift that his body gave him. And it's been a lot of fun to watch.

So during his start on Sunday, he had 22 swinging strikes, and this year he has nine starts with at least 21 swinging strikes. He had, I think, five as a Tiger. He had eight of 20 or more in the first decade of his career, and he has 10 of those this year. So you could go with that if you want. Struck out 14 guys too in a second consecutive start for the Astros, which was the first time I think a team had ever done that in back-to-back games. And that is because those guys are really great, but it's also because we're in this era. But yes, he has not lost a step, that's for sure. Yeah, so Cole's now at 13.6 per nine, which would be the all-time record.

The record is 13.4 by 6'10 Randy Johnson. Yeah, I wonder if being 6'10 is actually really an advantage. I mean, for him it was, I suppose, eventually, but it took him quite a while to get good, which people suggest may be because it just took him a long time to get his mechanics under control. And you don't see like a whole sport full of 6'10 pitchers the way that you see a whole sport full of 6'10 basketball players. You see tall pitchers, obviously, but 6'10, I mean, that's past the point of the bell curve where you tend to see a lot of pitchers congregate, which would suggest that it's probably not an advantage on the whole, right? Being 6'4 is an advantage,

but maybe once you get to 6'10, there are just so many moving parts that whatever advantage you gain from releasing the ball close to the plate and being deceptive and hard to pick up your pitches, maybe it's counteracted by just having to wrangle all of those body parts. I would guess that it's more that it is less of an advantage than it is in basketball. And so the overwhelming majority of athletic six foot 10 inch people become basketball players. Yeah, that could be too. I've never met a six foot 10 human, but you have.

You met Randy Johnson and that's a much smaller pool of humans. Did I? I didn't meet him, right? You talked to him on the podcast. I talked to him. Yes. That counts. Okay.

Are you telling me that I'm not friends with every one of our guests? I don't think I was friends with Randy Johnson after that interview. We should get Randy Johnson and Bud Selig on for episode 1500 at the same time. Bring our best guests back on. Exactly. All right. Anything else? No, I. Exactly. All right. Anything else? No, I guess not.

All right. Well, Ben, I had the opportunity this weekend to fill in for Christina Carl on the ESPN Power Rankings. The way this works is that some people get assigned their regular five teams, and then you write a little blurb about those teams. So I wrote the five for Christina, and then i read them

all and i thought these are good uh we should talk about these so these are all fun facts and i just want to talk about each one of them with you and wherever wherever they go they're very different fun facts so all right let's start with number seven the number seven team in the major leagues right now the oakland athletics dropping from number six to number seven team in the major leagues right now, the Oakland Athletics, dropping from number six to number seven. Here we go. Over the past two decades, 20 different A's teams, 400 different A's players, four different A's managers. Oakland has been under 500 in April and May, but has won 56% of its games in August. This year's A's went 17 and 9. August is not the only month. They're also very good in June and July, and then they're pretty good in September. So it's really a first two months, last four months thing. But

that is really not something that you would expect to be true of a team for two years. If I told you a team did that this year, and I'd do, well, do you think they're going to do it next year? You'd say no. And then if they did it two years then I say would you do it expect them to do it the third year and you'd say probably no and then probably even after like five years you'd be like well most of the players who were there in the first year aren't even there in the sixth year so why would I think that it's gonna like you can't even build a sample size where it should theoretically start to matter for you because it like it's new, it's new players. There's so much churn. And the only thing that is consistent, of course, is like the front office

has been very consistent. The what the one front office that has been consistent for 20 years. So they, of course, laid this out in Moneyball or Michael Lewis did where they had this philosophy that the first two months are for assessing and then the next two months are for addressing and then the last two months you should be clicking and that was i guess the idea back then and i don't know even at the time it sort of felt like it was just a convenient way of of looking at the one season that they were in uh that they were actually in as a way of after the fact giving it some narrative structure but enough, like they really are incredible every second half. And so, you know, the A's like early in this season, it sort of looked like, oh, well, I guess last year was kind of a fluke.

They're not actually that good. And then here they are, as always, playing really well in the second half. And so do you do you believe it? Do you really think that there is something to this? I mean, there's, they do not have the resources to add to fix things the way that, I mean, every team wants to fix their, like you could say, oh yeah, well, sure, they fix their problems, but every team fixes their problems. No team is like, wow, we're horrible in the bullpen. Well, let's just keep riding it. And the A's have fewer resources than any other team to actually do those fixes i mean they there's like a whole scene where he's trying

to get like ricardo rincone or something right and like that's the dramatic highlight of the whole book is like we got him ricardo rincone whereas other teams are like let's get manny machado so you wouldn't think that this would be something where like they've identified something that no one else ever thought of and you wouldn't think that they would have an advantage at this thing that everybody is theoretically trying to do and so does this to you add up to a real a real characteristic of the Oakland A's well I mean they have made bigger mid-season moves than Ricardo Rincon right they? They've added in deadline trades. I mean, they went and got John Lester, let's say. So that has happened, but I wouldn't say that that's consistent or that's really a reason. It's not like the upgrades are so enormous in midseason

that you would expect a team that was not very good to become very good after that. So I'm trying to think of any other way of constructing a roster that might lend itself to being a second half team or a first half team. Like, let's say you had a great catcher, for instance, and he's a great hitting catcher, but you work him really hard. And so he declines consistently in the second half of each season, which is like, what, if you look at Gary Carter, is it? Gary Carter had that pattern, I think, throughout his career. Yeah, I think that Carlton Fisk had it more. Yes. Okay, that's who I'm thinking of. Yeah. So, you know, Carlton Fisk, great player, but much more of a first half player because he would just catch so much that he'd get worn down.

And so if your team was dependent for 10 or 15 years or something on a star MVP level catcher, and he played like a super duper star early in the year, and then he was just a mediocre player the rest of the year, that's one thing. I was thinking the only other possibility that occurs to me, there was an article that Baseball Prospectus' Max Markey wrote back in 2013 where he tried to answer that question of who's ahead of whom at the start of the season. Are the pitchers ahead of the hitters or are the hitters ahead of the pitchers? And Max found that if you remove temperature from the equation, run scoring is actually at its highest level at the

beginning of the season, which normally we would think that scoring is up a little later in the year, but that's mostly or entirely because of the temperature. So if you account for that, then he concludes that pitchers are probably behind hitters early in the year. If you had, say, pitching dependent teams, notably pitching dependent, then maybe those teams would get into gear later in the year. Have the A's had pitching dependent teams more so than hitting? I don't know. Not in the last few years. I mean, it's hard because we're going to be probably when we try to answer this question on September 2nd, 2019, we're going to be thinking of like the most recent iterations of the a's and then you are into well that's just one team they of course they were for i mean they were famously pitching dependent right for those you know big three years but that was relatively

short period yeah and and i doubt i don't know i mean i'm just speculating here but i doubt if i were to go back i wouldn't find like hudson and zito and molder all had eras in the fives until mid-may right and max said that if you look at the defense team defense then that actually seems to go the other way where team defensive efficiency is higher at the beginning of the season and these recent as teams have been fueled by great defenses. So that would even go against the idea that they would be better in the second half. So it's weird. I mean, if you have enough teams and enough seasons, then you're going to get one that just happens to play better in the second half. But this is still improbable, I think,

what they have done over this period of time, but I probably wouldn't read too much into it. Okay, so Susan Slusser last year wrote the Baseball Perspectives annual essay about how the A's came to acquire all the midseason patches that they needed to get through the year because they had really like zero pitching last year. And yet they managed to get through the season with, you know, decent enough pitching. A bunch of players through the season with you know decent enough pitching a bunch of players who had been you know seemingly left in the year 2016 and that was interesting that that sort of seemed to make the case that like like the skill they have is being able to to uh to do the exact opposite of what we did when the stompers when we did the stompers which is

that like when a player left or when a player got injured we just threw up our hands and had literally nothing and they were able to say well geez there's 2 000 players and all of them are bad and they could pick the one who was not that bad but that is not really the story this year there hasn't been nearly the pitching churn for the most part and the players that they have like so frankie montas went down uh which is like kind of ironic because that was he was really good when they were not that good the a's were 36 and 36 at one point that was the last time they they were 500 and they've gone 42 and 22 since then and frankie montas hasn't been around at all since then and i think what they got homer bailey to replace him but homer bailey hasn't actually I think what they got Homer Bailey to replace him,

but Homer Bailey hasn't actually, I don't know if to directly to replace him, but they got Homer Bailey. He's been a starter. He hasn't been good. And otherwise it doesn't, I'm just looking at this. They got Fernando Rodney and he's got an ERA of nine. They got Jake Diekman.

He's got an ERA of 5.4. I'm trying to remember who else here they added. Well, they got Matt Olson back, right? Yeah, sure. Because he started the season hurt. Yeah. And he's been very good. He's been very good, yeah.

But as far as like adding players, as far as like picking up players, that hasn't. Well, yeah, that hasn't been a thing for them this year. So it's different every year, which makes it hard to identify what the process is that they're seemingly able to exploit. I don't know. I agree with you that it seems really unlikely that this could be a thing. So it's probably not. Yeah. If it were a thing, then you'd think that you could then extend whatever you do.

Just do the good thing in February. Just do it over the offseason instead. Build the whole plane out of August. Right, exactly. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know either. I just do not know. It's wild. I mean, like, well, if you think about the A's, like, so last year they survived partly because Blake Trinan and Luke Trevino were so incredible for them in the bullpen.

And both of them have been pretty disastrous this year. And, I mean, of course, the hitters are good. And so that's the secret. But there's not anything about that that would make you think that they would be a really good second half team. And again, it's not like they're adding players a lot. I don't know. It's very weird. So that's a thing about the A's.

All right. Let's go down to the number nine, Cleveland. Last week's ranking, also number nine. This is a crazy one, Ben. This one's wild. This might be my favorite one of the year. Okay. Okay. crazy one ben this one's wild are you this might be my favorite one of the year okay okay cleveland has the second fewest wins in baseball this year against 500 plus teams huh so they have won more

games against winning teams than the tigers but fewer than the royals have fewer than the orioles have fewer than the marlins have So as I preface this in the power rankings, this is partly because they rarely play good teams. The Royals, for instance, have to play Cleveland. So they have played Cleveland more games against winning teams. So they rarely play good teams. And then when they do play good teams, they're quite poor. They have a winning percentage this year of something like 380 against winning teams. So this, because there's two factors at play, one is that they have a really, really soft schedule, which makes it hard to know whether their record is itself misleading, whether they're not actually as good as their record.

But then the other thing is that they've been very poor against good teams. And this always, in extreme cases cases this often comes up when the playoffs come around because then we think is that a real is that a troubling sign is a team that beats good teams more likely to do well in postseason and is a team that doesn't beat good teams more likely to do poorly in postseason or are those two things more likely to be just split small sample splits that wash out entirely and that there's nothing real about this. This was also true for Cleveland last year. I mean, that fun fact wasn't true, but my recollection is that they were fairly poor against winning teams. I'm going to look that up

just to make sure, but we'll presume it is for the time being. And you could make a case for why it would be troubling. I mean, I think we all appreciate that there are some baseball players who max out at AA and just because they're good at AA, there's something about the jump to AAA that's just a little bit too much for their abilities and that there's some players who can do well in AAA,

but there's just something about the jump to the majors that's just a little too much for their abilities. And if you're playing a lot of players during the regular season, teams who have a lot of players that are essentially like low, low major league players, that they're kind of at the lower threshold and you know, you might be really good against those, but the skill that is required to beat up on bad players could, theoretically, it would make a certain amount of sense in the abstract, could be different than the skill required to beat up on or even hold your own against really great players.

That just because you can hit, just because the league hits 200 against Garrett Cole and hits 300 against Ross Detweiler doesn't mean that every 200 hitter against Garrett Cole is only going to hit 300 against Detweiler or that every 300 hitter against Detweiler is going to manage to hit 200 against Garrett Cole. There might be a bridge between those two that some players or some skill sets, I would say particularly skill sets, might not be able to cross. And I have been thinking about, I'm not letting you answer, am I?

I'm going to keep talking anyway. I've been thinking about this a lot because I think I'm going to write about this with regards to the Dodgers going into this postseason. But last year's A's were really, really, really bad against 95 mile an hour plus pitches. Like if you were to sort all the teams by what their slash line was against 95 plus the A's were at the bottom. If you were to sort by what their whiff rate was, the A's were at the bottom. And if you were to sort by what their chase rate was, the A's were near the bottom. They were really bad. Like they were clearly worse against 95 last year than any

other team in baseball. And you can survive a major league season because only nine, you know, 10% of pitches are going to be 95 plus, and you can really be good at all the other stuff. But then you get to the post season and that rate goes up by about twice as much. And when they face the Yankees in the wildcard game, half the pitches they saw were 95 plus half. And so then you could think, well, geez, did the A's really even have a chance in that game? And you would look at their record and you say, well, it's the same as the Yankees. And you look at their run differential and you go out, it's about the same as the Yankees. And you look at their road offense and it's better than the Yankees. And you think, all right,

they do have a chance, but maybe they didn't. Maybe in fact, it was this bridge that they could not cross to face good pitchers on a good team. And so the Dodgers, by the way, the Dodgers are the reverse of this. They're way ahead of everybody else on all three of those, or, you know, they're at the top on all three of those. And so I might write about that for the post season. I hope I will. So that would be a hypothesis to explain why a team like Cleveland might need to worry because of this. On the other hand, like you go to a splits page and you can find almost anything on some team's page. And so is it your sense that, that like we should be worried about this at all? Yeah, I know I've done

that very thing when I've had to say preview a playoff series or something and you have to have like five takeaways or five things that favor this team and five things that favor that team and really we're just trying to write something we're trying to tell people something interesting that they may not know but does this actually swing the odds significantly one way or another who knows I know I've done the 95 plus mile per hour pitches versus this team or like this team is the worst against sliders this year and they're facing a guy in this wildcard game who throws tons of sliders. So it's a bad matchup for this team. just looking at the splits page and finding something that seems interesting, seems telling, but may not actually be because maybe it's small sample. Maybe you're just looking at full season

numbers and the playoff roster is different from the full season roster. And who knows, maybe it's the certain guys sliders aren't like most guys sliders. I really don't know what to make of that. So when people ask me about the team record versus good or bad teams, I don't put a lot of stock in it. I feel like I've seen a study on this at some point, but I don't know if I've seen a definitive one that actually looked at a large sample and drew some conclusion from it. And drew some conclusion from it. So mostly I do disregard it, I think, because if you beat up on bad teams, that just seems like that should tell you something about a team's true talent level that would apply against good teams because all the teams are the worst teams right now than there typically is. So you could say that like the Tigers and the Orioles are really almost triple A teams at this point, whereas the Dodgers and the Yankees are like in a higher league in the Astros. So maybe now there would be more significance to that than there usually is. But on the whole, I am inclined not to put too much stock into it. i think i might have accidentally closed the tab okay by the way justin verlander's no hitter unfortunately sadly i wish

it had been was not a stat cast no hitter i am on the lookout for the first no hitter that is also a stat cast no hitter i think joe mentioned in his newsletter that there were only two two batted balls that that had yeah greater than what 50% chance of being a hit and they were both like ground balls yeah so that's pretty dominant yeah it is absolutely dominant the the fact that it is not a thing that has never existed um is not a knock on it it is simply that i would like to see this thing exist once all right next team is the san francisco giants over the past three seasons ben buster posey has hit one home run after the trade deadline so that's like a lot of months right

that's that's a full season basically that's about six months except it's not really because he's hasn't played september this year and he didn't play september one other year but still one home run and so this uh i i had to hold my tongue when you were talking about carlton fisk and catchers who wear down one way to talk about this is to note that buster posey has been a catcher who has really for the last few years bunch of years has really like looked like the tiredest player in the game in the second half nobody wears it more i think the second half than buster posey and i don't know this is totally spitballing no no real deep thought put into this at all but uh you wonder

if there's anything uh about his having caught three long postseason runs that uh had an effect on his later career uh whether the exhaustion of catching what was essentially 155 or something, 160 games a year for those three years was just is something that takes it out of you the same way that throwing a, you know, 150 pitches would would do something to your arm as a pitcher. But what I really wanted to note is that one of the easiest ways to have a really happy season, even if your team is not, is not very good, is to have your young players kind of come together. You know, you get a, a prospect comes up and he's better than you expected, or a non-prospect comes up and all

of a sudden he's better than expected. And you just go, oh man, this is the future. This is great. And one of the easiest ways to have a sad season, no matter what, is to have your best player, your star, your headline player, your highest paid player, have a really bad year. And this is true if it's a player who's been kind of trending downward

and it gets steeper. It's also true if it's a player who's been like at his peak and then he has a year where that's like, you know, a real significant step back and you think well he's 31 like the like he's probably not bouncing back like there's something about your the player that you've got signed for five more years taking a big step back

at 31 or 32 that just feels like a huge bummer Buster Posey is signed for only two more years after this but this, this was a really difficult season for him. And we talked about this with, with Meg the other day in our best players of the decade thing, but it is crazy how quickly he went from seeming like an automatic hall of famer to, to quite possibly not having enough left in this career to get, you know, the last 10 war or so that he quite possibly needs. Yeah.

And so I wanted to, uh, to throw it out to you, Ben, who are the most depressing superstar seasons or, um, you know, veteran star seasons this year? Like who, if you were a fan of the team, who would you just feel most frustrated by let down by hopeless about, or simply like just all the enthusiasm you had about this invincible because that's really what superstars are like they're a feeling of certainty you you go well you can argue with your with your dad or your uncle or your sister about like whether the shortstop who had um you know a good september last year is going to carry it forward or whether really he's he he's all hit no feel or all feel no hit and you can debate like well is he good or

is he not good but then like the superstars you don't even have to debate it's just like they're great you count on them you trust them to be great and then suddenly with no warning whatsoever they drop from third in mvp voting to not getting votes one year, and they're still pretty good. But you just know that at that age, they're probably not going to come back and do it again. And so they're both hard. So who are your picks? Who are your guys this year who didn't make you happy? Well, so, I mean, there are some guys who've just been on this list for a while right

so we're just i mean we're not talking about like pool holes and i do i have i i would feel zero i think i feel zero particular emotion about pool season just because it was within expectations yeah it's the same it's what we expected which yeah we'd like to expect better he would have been very high on this list a few years ago but now it's past that point where you're actually surprised by it. He actually has bounced back. He's got a league average OPS this year. Yeah, he has. He's at 100.2 war, man.

He has not continued to decline, so that's a victory. I think for me it's probably Joey Votto would be at the top of the list. For me, it's probably Joey Votto would be at the top of the list. He took a step back last year, but he was still a very good player, a very good hitter. He just lost some of his power, and he just sort of figured that because he had been such a metronome before that, that he would just make some minor adjustment and he'd bounce back or he'd be a little more healthy and he'd bounce back. And instead, he has taken another big step back, and he is now probably a worse hitter than albert pujols this year right because he has a 97 wrc plus and that makes him not much better than a replacement level player as a first baseman and that is disappointing because even more so than with most superstars, I had this feeling that Joey Votto would just be good forever because, you know, he's so smart about how he goes about the

game and he makes all these adjustments and he looks at all the numbers. And so he would be particularly attuned to whatever's going on with his game and he'd be able to make some tweak and keep it going. And maybe he did because at this point he's 35 and you'd expect him to have declined he's almost 36 but he could not keep it going indefinitely and it's sort of extra demoralizing because the reds are almost good again i mean they've been an interesting team this year they've played better than their place in the standing suggests and so it would be even worse if the reds get good just as he gets bad because he suffered through a lot of lean years and you'd like him to play an important part on a reds playoff team again and i don't know that

that can happen now so that's probably up there in a stratosphere by itself i don't know that anything i mean I guess there's like Paul Goldschmidt has had a disappointing season, although the way that it's trended, where he started out terribly and then got hot and has not gotten his numbers back to typical Goldschmidt territory, but he's been part of the Cardinals' resurgence says a team. So maybe that takes some of the sting out of it. Yeah, I feel sad about Goldschmidt. He is the player I was thinking about when I not so cleverly disguised him as finishing third in MVP voting

instead of finishing sixth, which is what Goldschmidt actually finished last year. But yeah, he seems like an example of a player who will still be a good major leaguer for a while but probably the years where you like flip over to watch him are probably gone and they just ended if i mean maybe maybe he comes back it happens all the time so not ruling it out but it just happened in a snap you know, like in the off season, I was just listening to your guys episode about the Goldschmidt trade. And, you know, he was a top like six player in baseball.

He was a superstar. And there was no part of that conversation was, yeah, but what if Goldschmidt's just not good anymore? Like we weren't thinking about it at all. And it just really happens very quickly. So yeah, Goldschmidt and Votto are the first two that jumped to my mind as well. Neither one of them in any way is a disaster. They're both able to be on a good major league team. And Goldschmidt, you know, particularly has potentially a bright

future ahead still, but somewhat tough superstar seasons. Matt Carpenter is like Joey Votto light in a lot of ways. And he's been even worse than Joey Votto. Matt matt carpenter is like joey vato light in a lot of ways and his his he's been even worse than joey vato joe matt carpenter is not playing regularly anymore he has been he has kind of lost the starting job and uh that happened really fast too yeah he does play he starts sometimes but uh he is not he is not a full-timer anymore robinson cano is uh it's always hard it's especially hard when you uh trade for a player or you sign a player and you just invest so much in like literal treasure but also in expectations that this is going to be the thing that turns the season around that turns our team around and in fact the cardinals got goldschmidt and they're going to make the playoffs

ending their playoff drought so that worked and who And who knows, maybe the Mets will with Cano, but Cano, obviously a very tough season. And, um, and really Edwin Diaz too. Uh, you go get the best closer in baseball, arguably. And, um, you fix the, the one terrible hole that your team had, and then he does what relievers do. That's brutal. Right. And, uh, and then lastly, there's a totally different category, but a year of just not getting to watch Giancarlo Stanton hit dingers. It's a, it is a lost opportunity for us in our lives. Yeah. I don't know if, if Jake Arrieta belongs on this list or whether he was already on this

list in the last year or two, but the season he had and then getting hurt and maybe his underperformance was related to the injury that he was pitching through. I'm sure it was. But at this point, he's getting on in years and now has this injury and he'll be out for a while. So yeah, he's someone who, I mean, he sort of shocked us with how great he got quickly, but he has receded from that point, not as quickly, but pretty dramatically now. All right.

Next power ranking. Can I ask you one thing about Posey? So when you see a second half split like that for a catcher, do you think, oh, that's on the manager, that's on the team? catcher do you think oh that's on the manager that's on the team like we used to talk about this with sal perez and the royals because sal perez had the same sort of thing where he was dramatically worse in the second half of the season and by the time he got to the playoffs it was like he was a shadow of his former self it seemed like and he was swinging at everything although obviously he had some big hits but that was a case where he just wanted to play all the time and it seemed like Yost was willing to play him all the time and they didn't really have a good backup catcher when you have Posey

maybe it's like well you can't have a good backup catcher who's anywhere near as good as Buster Posey because he was maybe the best player in baseball for a little while. So maybe you don't fault him there. But if it's that dramatic, do you just think, well, maybe they should have given him more days off or made him take more days off? And maybe you lose a little from not having him in the lineup, but you also gain a little because when he's in the lineup, he'll be more productive. I think that over the last half decade, they really rested him a lot and plays a lot of first base, which is not a full rest, but he and plays a lot of first base which is not a full rest but he

does play a lot of first base and it was it seemed to me that it was kind of clear that that posy wearing down was an issue that they had to address and that they have i don't watch it as closely as i used to but it feels like he he is not overused as a catcher, except just that he's kind of old and he's got various ailments. He's played through injuries in the past. I think that he's just tired. I think that, again, it's totally speculating, but you could convince me that he was overworked over a five-year period, but I think probably everybody was really

happy with how that turned out and so i don't think that you would even say that you would do anything about that i mean for the most part those three seasons that they won the world series like they were in pennant races to the last day they weren't coasting through September or anything like that. And so, you know, he was needed. Okay. All right. Number 27, Miami Marlins dropping. Nope. Holding at number 27.

22 of the 25 lowest attendance games in Major League Baseball this year have been in Miami, but the Marlins draw hit a new low this week. Just 5,297 paid on Monday and 24,000 over a four game set fewer fans in a four game series than 18 major league teams average per game. There's not much to say about the Marlins. I guess one thing to say about them is it is astounding that you can be, you can have this much fewer business and still apparently be profitable. It really puts into perspective how much money the

other teams must be making right i mean a team wanted the marlins so bad that they paid jeffrey loria a billion dollars yeah and took on a bunch of debt yeah so like i don't know if they're actually in the black every year but they're whoever owns the marlins is going to be richer the day they sell than the day they bought. And so, yeah, just think of what it must be like to own, you know, any other team and then to cry poor. But I was wondering, it's bleak to watch a Marlins game with 5,297 people. It is not a fun experience. I imagine it's even less fun to be in the ballpark. And that's just a fact. That's the Marlins. It's all baked in. There's not much to say about the Marlins

attendance. I want to know if you think that baseball will always be a game that is viewed by many thousands of people, or if the viewing audience will eventually be primarily focused on people who are remote and that we don't even need a crowd. Like, could you imagine perhaps 10,000 seat stadiums, for instance, and that we don't think of baseball as a game that you go to anymore, but that you just watch or follow? Yes, I can imagine that. I would rather have the problem, if you can call it a problem, that baseball currently has, have the problem, if you can call it a problem, that baseball currently has where attendance is declining relative to its peak, but revenues are still strong and local TV ratings are still strong. I think I'd rather have that than the opposite where you have a lot of people in the

ballpark, but no one's watching on TV. So I think it's viable. I mean, what concerns me is that maybe you need people in person to see and fall in love with baseball. Maybe you can't fall in love with it from afar watching remotely. And so you need that in-person experience to turn you into a future TV viewer. I don't know if that's true or not, but I think that's the risk some teams are taking. Like if you're the Dodgers and no one can watch your, well, that's an entirely different problem. That's the opposite problem. So if you have the Dodgers where people can go to the games in person, but no one can watch them for years at a time, that seems to me like potentially a bigger problem down the road because you're not reaching that comparatively massive TV audience that could one day turn into a ticket buying audience, but maybe not. Maybe you don't even need them to. So I think it could work. Yes. I think if we eventually get to the point where there are just so many entertainment options and we're all just so cozy on our couches with our massive TVs or our VR ballpark experiences, which we're not that far

away from maybe just simulating being at the ballpark without actually having to go. And I could imagine that working and still being entertaining and profitable. Yeah. I, in a way the ballpark experience right now, one of its big competitors is simply how much technology has gone into the broadcasts and into the data that is accessible to everybody who is watching along. I mean, in a, in a, in a way going to the ballpark is immersing yourself in the environment, but following the game a lot, a lot less closely, like you can't follow the game with the same level of attention and detail, because you don't have anything in front of you, you just have, like, it's what you're just gonna give me the nine

players, and then the one in the umpire, like, that's all the data you're giving me is like, where they're standing and where they're moving. Yeah. And so there's a, I don't know, maybe eventually the ballpark experience, the technology within the ballpark is able to make all that accessible to the fan in his seat. I want to, if I want to go to a game that then I go to a game, but if I want to follow a game, like if I really want to watch a game and watch, you know, say a pitcher who's like, you know, making his major league debut or who I'm writing about, I am not going to go sit in the stands and try to follow from the stands. I'm going to sit at home where the camera angle is great, where you can see the grip on the pitches every

time they show do you know ben i'm a little embarrassed to admit this but it wasn't until about maybe three years ago that i realized that that replay that they show of the pitch coming out of the pitcher's hand i was supposed to be watching that for the grip as opposed to i thought that that was just where they started the replay and that like it was I was supposed to be watching the ball travel. I thought the primary purpose of that replay was for me to see the pitch again go past home plate. But no, they start it right where the fingers are on the grip so I can see what the pitch was. I am embarrassed to admit that, but it is true. So anyway, you get to see the grip and you get to see i mean if i don't need to tell you you get to

see everything it's incredible what you can see on a tv broadcast plus your computer so and it doesn't cost anything except what you're already paying for cable or mlb tv or whatever yeah i mean oh trying to trying to describe how well a pitcher pitched from a from a ballpark seat, even from a good ballpark seat, is so much harder than trying to describe it from your couch. Yeah, that's why I always, when the playoffs roll around and my editor asks, well, do you want to travel? Do you want to go to games? And I usually say, no, not really. I mean, I have. I went to the World Series in Kansas City. I'm not saying there's nothing you can't get from the in ballpark experience. And there's a community aspect to it. And you get to hear the crowd. And maybe you sense some electricity in the air or something. If you're just doing kind of a standard game story, then really you're better off doing that from your couch, especially in the playoffs when you're not getting a ton of availability and access to the players. So you're just kind of getting the same press conference that everyone else is, and they put those transcripts online so you don't even have to be there. line so you don't even have to be there and you just feel like you have all this information at your fingertips when you're at home and you can look at the game feed and the stack cast feed and

game day and look up everything with good wi-fi not press box wi-fi that a hundred other writers are trying to use at the same time and you can go back and watch the pitch as many times as you want to you just feel so much more in command of what's actually happening, or at least I do. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Last one.

Travis DeMeritt of the Tigers went one for 22. His OPS dropped from like 820 to like 680 or something like that. And so now Tigers have two hitters with an OPS better than the league average. They are pitcher Matt Boyd, who's one for two, and pitcher Gregory Soto, who's two for two. Those are the only two people on their team, on their roster, current Tigers, who are over 100 OPS plus. Nick Castellanos, of course, was traded.

His was 105 at the time. Castellanos, of course, was traded. His was 105 at the time. And he is the only player who has appeared on the Tigers this year in more than those two plate appearances who has an OPS plus over 100. So you can go either way. You can go with the one all season or you can go with the none. A Tiger fan goes to the park these days and sees none. But either way, it is definitely not just another bad team. This decade,

no team has had fewer than two players that had an OPS plus over 100. And the Tigers, if you count Castellanos, have one. So this is like a new we've reached. I don't know if we've reached a new low in bad teams being terrible. The Tigers aren't going to lose 121 games or anything like that. And I don't even know if their offense is worse than other teams offense. It's hard to tell these days because you can punt a home run, but the Tigers do not have any average hitters.

That's what I was saying. They don't have any average hitters. And I don't know, you know, I like it. I get the, I get the going for, you know, the future and trading everything that you can to make yourself good in the future. It makes sense. I've cheered it in the past and I've, you know, kind of grown very ambivalent about it more recently, but you know, I get, I get it. It makes sense. It's rational. The GMs are doing certainly the best thing from their standpoint, but it seems hard for me to imagine that there is not room on a rebuilding team for a single average player. Well, they had one and then they traded him,

right, in Castellanos, but I don't know because it is very bleak and it's not fun to watch, I imagine. I don't even know from recent personal experience because I have not been tuning in to watch the Tigers. And yet there's a way in which it makes the sport more interesting to have a terrible team. And I feel bad saying this for the Tigers fans out there who are suffering through this right now although you all had a good run the Tigers are terrible right now because they were very good for quite a long time and it's tough to keep that up indefinitely but I think we would not be talking about the Tigers right now on this podcast if they were merely 65 win bad or even 60 win bad we're talking about them because they are 50 win bad or worse. And that almost makes the sport more interesting in a way because they would not be notably

more entertaining if they did have an average hitter or two, right? You wouldn't be watching them to see this one average hitter. So the fact that they don't have an average hitter that's new that makes us perk up and say wow this team is reaching new levels so in a way they're more entertaining as a truly terrible team than they would be as a merely very bad equally out of contention but not quite as pathetic team team. Yeah, you are taking the phrase fun fact very literally. It must be fun. You said it was a fun fact.

They're fun. All right. I'm glad you said that. I am constantly pondering this question in my mind, and I'm glad we brought up these tigers. I'm glad we didn't let this tiger season pass a notice and um and i'm glad that you said that and i don't have anything to add all right oh by the way arstitas aquino yeah he said another another record at what point do you

when would we get to the point where it stops being three seven sixty three when he gets to seven when he gets to the most home runs in history in any number of games. Now, what were you going to finish your sentence? Basically that. I mean, he's the fastest to 15 home runs now. Oh, so is it going to be like... Okay, I would say... Well, like I saw...

I think I saw that Trout was the fastest to 200... 200? 200 home runs, 200 steals? I did see that. And I think I saw Aaron Judge was like the something fastest to 100. The third fastest to 100 home runs the other day. I saw someone this year I think was the something fastest to like 2,500 strikeouts or something. So I think it goes forever i think i think that you don't necessarily bring it up if the player is clearly like beyond like his his achievements phase of his career like if

there's if he's not moving toward the player above him i don't think you keep saying it so yeah if for instance well i don't know what uh i think you just know. I think there's really no downside to putting it out there, I think, at this point. If you have to be writing recaps of the game, then why wouldn't you get that sentence done? But it's kind of deflating when you read that he's surpassing Rhys Hoskins when he's the fastest ever to 15. Because it's like, well, Rhys Hoskins is a good player. He's a good hitter, but that's what he is unless he reaches some new high at the age of 26. I mean, he's a solidly above average hitter, but that's it. He's not continuing to chase any records or anything.

It's just that he came up at the previous highest home run year ever, and now Aquino comes up in an even higher home run rate year, and so he's displacing Hoskins. It would be a little bit better if he were displacing someone who went on to do something truly spectacular in the arena of home run hitting instead of Reece Hoskins, but that's where we are. Yeah, yeah.

No, that's the problem problem that's the problem with the the first records is it's very rarely a hall of famer yeah but it's about time for you to write your your Cody Bellinger article about what if we're watching oh yeah Aquino the the future home run champion oh well no it's not because Aquino, I guess he's 25. And I mean, like even the Bellinger piece, it was not a complete lark. I wrote that partly because I asked Dan Zimborski and he did the like 25 year projections for Cody Bellinger and found that he had something like a 1% chance of breaking the record and something like, I don't remember, like a 10% chance or a 25% chance of having 500 and something like uh i don't remember like a 10 chance or 25 chance of having 500 or something like that and so the point was that it is not too early to be optimistic it

and someone someone emailed me and said what about judge he has more home runs than bellinger but judge was 24 at the time so um you can't your your your semi-satirical articles have to be somewhat grounded but if you just did youngest two though you would get all hall of famers that's the problem is that we should not treat we should not treat these players careers as beginning the day they get called up to the majors their careers like the the age is far more significant to their place in history than how many games they previously have had in the majors. I mean, this is a problem with Rookie of the Year voting. The whole concept of Rookie of the Year voting is very strange to me and unsatisfying.

It should be like, you know, it should be a best 22 and under player or something like that. And so if you had fastest two records by age instead of by games played you'd get all hall of famers and they would all be satisfying but you'd get a lot fewer of them which would not be so bad from a reader's perspective but from the perspective of someone who has to pump out stories every time something happens i guess you want more fun facts that aren't really all that fun. Well, I just gave you five. No, those were fun, though. I started saying that before you finish your sentence. Okay, we'll end there.

All right. Okay, thanks for listening. Sam and I both have new feature stories up, by the way. They went up on Labor Day, so you may have missed them. We may talk about them next time. We'll see. But in the meantime, I will link to them in the show notes and in the Facebook group. Sam wrote a profile of Christian Jelic and how he got so good for ESPN's body issue. And I wrote about knuckleballs and how we're seeing a dwindling number of knuckleballs thrown in the big leagues, but how technology may preserve the pitch,

whether it's high-speed cameras helping pitchers perfect their knuckleballs or perhaps robot umpires, which could have a beneficial effect for knuckleballers, you can read all about that. I enjoyed working on that story. I am a pro-knuckleball person. As I recall, Sam, not anti-knuckleball, but not as jazzed about knuckleballs as I am. I am very invested in the knuckleball continuing to stay endangered, but not extinct. I'm also invested in this podcast continuing, and you can help ensure that that's the case. By supporting us on Patreon. At patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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And David Hassler. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. Coming up on 9,500 members. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. And thanks to those of you who have left reviews or ratings since Meg and I discussed the ratings last week. You can keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Ratings and reviews for that are appreciated as well at Amazon and Goodreads. We will be back with another episode a little later this week. You should have seen their frantic faces As they screamed and cried, please put away the knife

I guess I'll go to hell Or rot here in this cell. But who taught who the cold hard facts of life? Who taught who the cold hard facts of life?